Opera Mini

Today, Opera released Opera Mini, a browser written in Java for all the Java capable mobile phones out there

By the use of a special proxy server, they manage to both minimize the traffic a usual browsing session generates and to keep the application as performant as possible.

When I tried to download the application via WAP, all I got was an ‘Invalid Jad Request’-Error (wahtever that meant), but with some sneakyness, I found the download URL for the jar file none the less (the linked version is the high-memory version. There’s another for less advanced phones)

I copied the file over to my K750i via bluetooth which is cheaper than downloading it and it also had the advantage of actually working.

The browser is very nice. While it uses quite some time to finally launch, surfing is very quick. And the very good font rendering (of course operas small screen rendering is active aswell) makes this a pleasure to use and is the first justification why a phone should have a screen resolution as big as the K750i’s

And the most interesting thing: Opera uses the default internet GPRS profile. Not the WAP one. This makes surfing via opera a whole lot cheaper than via the built-in wap browser of my phone.